Alerts for VS on Waterson are getting old....

Since the beginning of never.

i know i and my outfit have seen some things go out over /orders that have made us all go WAT?!?

and in general when i roll with some of the zerg fits they simply live up to their names. they are mindless purple hordess searching for certs with no tactical bearing.

THAT SAID
occasionally we get some people who get it.
and sometimes orders chat works. a few nights back i sounded the alarm on an NC advance to the last biolab the VS held, and we stopped them at SNA and split peak.

so sometimes we can mount a defence

but most of the time, there is no defense to speak of.
i can't tell you how many times i've seen a zerg lose a base they had left not more than 4 minutes before

Yes underpop is a downside, but we won alerts with lower then 25%
We just need more people going for the objective and not standing back like idiots using each other as meatshields.

You want to be an infiltraitor so bad ? Fine, at least use your darts.
You want to be an engi standing on your turret 24/7 ? Sure, please drop ammo and we will leave you alone.
Find the need to me HA all the time ? Then try to deal with 1 tank in your life instead of camping useless spawns.
You find people of every class and vehicle just going for points thinking "Oh im sure the rest will do the stuff i should help with"

Cmon guys, every class can be played, but please use the one team option you have once.
Also there is no need to ****talk after every base, this is a thing going for all factions.

Rant Rant Rant RABABABABBA

I couldn't make a 2nd character on Mattherson about 3 weeks ago. The server option was just not available. I assumed it's to stop the 4th faction.

There isn't going to be a perfect solution for population imbalance until server merges occur, but vehicle bonuses make more sense than XP bonuses. There's no point to add an incentive for playing an underpopped faction, when there just aren't enough players in that faction. Most land vehicles are idiot proof anyways. You can't tell me giving the underpopped faction 4x more lightning tanks or 4x more MAX suits wouldn't make a difference when they're going 2 vs 1 in population. 4x is not an exaggeration either. VS have 2x the population, therefore they already get 2x more resources.

I think the new resource revamp will actually accomplish some of this. There will be a common pool of resources, so 2x overpopped factions won't get 2x vehicles and a the current resource bonus will actually give under popped factions more vehicles.

Mattherson VS are a bit in the dumps this last week, not winning many prime time alerts. Mattherson TR, OTOH, are starting to win alerts again. Mattherson NC... need to play the alert objectives more often.

It's all swings and roundabouts really.

Depends how you define 4th faction (I narrowly define it as people who switch sides during an alert).

Most of the problems with alert population is because:

• One side decides to not play the alert objectives. Which means their side starts losing territory / alert goals.
• Lack of open public squads / platoons to rally the greenies.
• Pubbies login, see that their side is losing, and log back out (to play some other game).
• The winning side players tend to stay logged in, because they are already winning.
• Which leads to more players leaving each minute, then who are joining each minute.

The proper fixes to this lie on both sides (SOE and the players):

• Two hour alerts are too long. If it is a continent-specific alert, then it needs to be 45-60 minutes maximum.
• Players need to throw open squads at the start of the alert.
• PLs/SLs need to be *positive* attitude through the alert.
• PLs who decide to "opt-out" of the alert are hurting the morale of their faction.
• SOE needs to add back the server-level population XP bonus, make it big, stack it with the continent-level bonus.
• SOE needs to introduce a "local" XP bonus that kicks in if there are 24+ people within your hex and the surrounding six hexes. Make it scale up to +100% if you are outnumbered 6:1 or more.

Sample graphs:

http://www.ps2alerts.com/alertdetail.php?AlertID=3573
- Waterson Esamir Territory alert, VS started in the dumps at the start of prime-time and just failed to gain population as fast as TR/NC.

http://www.ps2alerts.com/alertdetail.php?AlertID=3571
- Mattherson Amerish Territory Alert, all three sides had competitive population through the alert. This is what alert population should look like, all three factions steadily rising in population.

http://www.ps2alerts.com/alertdetail.php?AlertID=3522
- Waterson Amerish Territory Alert, VS started even pop, but failed to add members faster then they lost members.

Please note that the graphs are not anchored on the zero point, so they exaggerate the differences between the populations on the server.

Ya its nice really, competition is back.

We can make all sorts of guesses at why the population dips during the late night alerts, but we need to assume the worst case and I think the most simple reason. There's just more VS main account players at night time on Mattherson.

While I agree with the rest of your comments, I don't believe XP bonus will have any effect. There's already a huge XP bonus already, I get 75% throughout most of the alerts, but the population still gets to 50/25/25. Even if you make the XP bonus 200%, who's going to give up on their BR50 VS to start a BR1 NC/TR?

Hi, I play VS on Waterson. I fly some but I primarily play shooter infantry classes (although I did level up as an engineer). My general strategy is that I play just defense unless there is nowhere to defend on my current continent. When I successfully, or unsuccessfully defend a facility i press 'u' and move on to the next defense. I am not going to be picking defenses where the attackers have 80+% of the population in the zone. This is pretty normal for an alert continent. I guess I'm an experienced player, and I know a great many of the other experienced players feel about the same. I don't have much regard for the 'leaders' in command chat but I'm not going to defame them in their own channel, so I do my own thing. Generally this means moving to a different continent during an alert. Ask around, I play a lot and I don't speak for everyone of course but I think many would agree on Waterson VS.

-Hypno

In other words: Don't fight the zerg, become the zerg.

This may draw some criticism but: I vote just drop Alerts altogether. They seem to encourage all sorts of bad things:

* Zergs (I am referring to the 'bad', overwhelming force, kind).
* People on the losing factions not sticking around for the end of the alert (why bother?)
* 4th factioning (if it really is a problem, that is)

Without the alert a smaller population (and potentially smaller territory) won't kill your fun. Having an alert reward that you can't get does kill fun.

I'm NC on Waterson. I'm part of the problem, I guess, but I made that character on day one and that's where all my xp / gear is. I don't want to spend another year leveling up a new character because of a population imbalance. I understand your pain, but I'm not sure of a solution, really.

How bout an SC item, that changes your characters faction.
You get all your used/unused certs as well as your name, and ofc all SC purchases carry over as well.

I would give it a free one-time offer then charge after that.
And possibly put a floating cap on world population as far as the initial free one-time offer.

Just an idea.

I did. If you purchased your NC weapons with SC, it's not even that hard to start over on the new faction. Combine that with the +50% XP bonus and 48 certs/day for being a member and it's even easier. Now my two alts are in their 30s-50s as well.

As for the server-level bonus. It would be an inexpensive attempt to fix the issue of there not being enough incentive to stick around. The code is not that much harder then the continent level XP bonus. Given how many players flock to double-XP weekends, why not take a shot at giving the equivalent to the faction who is suffering an under-pop situation? A lot of the pubbies are focused on XP/hr.

Server pop bonuses used to be advertised on the character select screen. Which may have persuaded people to login to their alt on the lower-pop faction, all else being equal. The bad part about the old server-pop XP bonuses was they were laughably tiny. Unless you are advertising double-digit bonuses, players really aren't going to pay attention. Which is why the server bonus needs to be at least as large as the continent level bonus, and maybe larger. You want to catch players at the character select screen and offer them a carrot for logging in on the under-pop faction.

The other reason to offer bigger incentives is that it may be enough to convince people to stay logged in on the under-pop side. They may look at their XP bonus and see +125% or +150% and think "even if we can come in 2nd we'll get more XP then the winners". And the worse the odds get, the more that XP bonus goes up.